The Raven Is Dead! Long Live The Raven!

Hello, Raven readers. This is not the Raven but rather Jon Lee, manager at River City Books, and I am writing to inform you of some very sad news. The River City Raven has died.

As you know, all of us at River City Books have been noticeably distraught by the recent announcement that our store would soon close. But no one took it harder than the Raven.

For a along time, he denied that the news was actually true. “I know,” he said, “you’re going to reopen on April 1 and that this will go down as the all-time gag on this Hall of Fame fool.” But as the weeks went on and as our shelves became depleted with no reinforcements in sight, he started to see that we were not joking, and a palpable depression came over him. None of us can ever remember our black bird so blue. He would come into the store, same as always, but there was something missing, some darkness in his eyes that we have had never seen before.

Well, he started eating. A lot. Put on some weight in a hurry, in fact. We didn’t want to say anything because it made him self-conscious but the Raven became so bloated he couldn’t even lift himself up to our remainder tables. In a way, his anxiety swelled in his belly as though he was about to give birth to a bowling ball. It was difficult to see him like that, believe me. This was Willie Mays in a Mets uniform.

But the Say Hey Kid only left center field, not the earth. Our dear Raven is gone, having ate himself into oblivion.

You should know, though, that even in his most difficult hours, he never forgot you, his dear readers. “I can’t let them down,” he would say between bacon melts. And so he kept working until the end. In fact, when we found him this morning he had passed in the most appropriate of places — on his keyboard. His unfinished manuscript will be left for scholars to reconcile. What I can tell you is the last word he ever wrote.